I love exploring, many of the people I regularly game with love exploring. I’m fairly sure Spinks and Hawley do too. In fact, we’re the kind of players that like to see as much as we can. So we were delighted with the most recent article on Gamespot UK about lairs:

These will be out-of-the-way areas where exceptionally powerful and rare foes hide out of plain sight and guard exceptionally powerful loot.

One of the things I remember reading a long long time ago about Warhammer Online was that there would be all sort of cool places to discover, with puzzle locks and stuff. I’d forgotten about all that until I read this article again and now I’m really excited about it all over again. Continuing on the puzzle theme:

none of the game’s lairs will have any kind of duplicate content or puzzles, so there will be no one-size-fits-all solution to unlock all of them.

It’s nice to see that in an RvR-focussed game, there is still some PvE candy for players to enjoy when they want a different pace. I hope to discover and conquer as many lairs as possible!

In other news, Ten Ton Hammer has a short write-up of Mount Bloodhorn and the Greenskin starter area. We haven’t been linking to every little bit of news coming out, but this one is well-written, amusing and takes you through some of the things you get to do when first emerging into the game on the Greenskin side.

Meanwhile, Massively continues it’s slightly sterile overview of the elves of WAR. They’re going through the spells/skills you get from 1-5 and then 6-10. I’m not really reading them, because hrrm.. I can generally wait to read spell descriptions (plus yeah, am in the beta as Spinks just pointed out to me, so I don’t need to). However, over at Player vs Developer I was alerted to one comment in a Massively guide that’s a little naughty. It comes in the Archmage 1-5 guide and says:

Just drop a DoT (or two) on every single mob in the PQ area. If there are enough people there, all mobs will die too quickly to even take a swipe at you. With your ability to DoT multiple mobs, your total damage output for the PQ will at or near the top.

Sigh. Please note – they say ‘if there are enough people there’. This may not be the best solo tactic! And this may not hold for every public quest you come across. And hey, don’t forget you can heal too.

Been reading the gamespy blog this week? I know I have. I’m enjoying it, although there are parts where I want to say ‘wait, no that’s not quite right’ and can’t yet!

Massively are also doing some official pre-NDA blogging. And they’re talking about elves. Keep an eye on that URL, it sounds as though they have a lot more coming!

And stay tuned, because Massively is going to be your place to turn once the NDA comes down! We’ll have exhaustive guides on each of the racial starting zones. We’ll have detailed walkthroughs of the mighty Inevitable City and stalwart Altdorf. We’ll even have class guides, broken out by faction and class role!

Much as it’s cool to read it, you have to feel bad for the people who’d written guides on some of this stuff. Ah well, there’s still another week, eh readers? And may the best guide win! Don’t get the wrong idea from the quote, lots of other sites have post-NDA guides planned too!

We’ll be pointing out our favourites, and giving marks out of 10 for style and substance. There may even be a WAR post-NDA guide drinking game in the works.